Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  But by the time he started his new pursuits, the university was roiled by conflict. Already, universities around Germany were becoming hot-beds of support for Hitler, with fascist students harassing liberal and leftist professors, and not a few faculty heralded them. The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) rampaged against signs of “un-German spirit” and welcomed Nazi speakers to their rallies. It was these students who stormed the University of Berlin’s magnificent library in May 1933 and proceeded to ignite tens of thousands of volumes at the Opernplatz, in front of the law faculty and around the corner from Hegel’s old office. It is hard to say how much actual “studying” Otto Albert conducted during his sojourn at the University of Berlin. It was extremely brief, affiliated with the Institute for Political Science and Statistics under the wing of the School of Law and Political Science for one semester, the winter of 1932–33. This was, to be sure, a fairly esoteric and probably quite isolated unit within the university’s general focus on law, the humanities, and the natural sciences. Still, Hirschmann sought it out. His courses focused on classical political economy, under the aegis of “Political Science Tutorial.” He was applauded for his oral and written reports, “The Critique of Smith’s Doctrine of Money and Capital through Marx” and “The Limits and Scope of Ricardo’s Labor Theory of Value.” Beyond this, we know little of his studies, which appear to have focused on deep background readings in classical political economy and on the pamphlets he was reading in the SAJ study groups.24

  Whatever career he initiated at the University of Berlin was overwhelmed by the demise of the republic. The underlying compromise that held the Weimar regime together did not just collapse. It was destroyed by those who never believed in it and those who lost faith in it. The Hirschmanns could not be counted in either camp.

  Nor did they see the catastrophe coming. There has been a debate among historians about just how predictable the Third Reich was. The current thought is that Hitler’s triumph and consolidation depended as much on the shrewdness with which he played the political system as on the haplessness and denial of his democratic opposition before then. To be sure, there were plenty of explanations for the crisis of both the economy and the political system, but few could anticipate the brutality of what came later. Increasingly, the votes went to the extremes. The Communists inched into Socialist support. Germans went to the polls in a flurry of chaotic and highly mobilized elections that did less and less to resolve the impasse and more and more to convince onlookers that the old order was beyond repair. In 1932, with Hirschmann in his final year of study, Germany endured two Reichstag elections, two presidential runoffs, and a welter of local elections and watched three chancellors come and go. In July of that year, when the young Hirschmann had graduated and was devoting himself to full-time militancy and left-wing study, the Nazis took 37 percent of the vote to become the largest party, with 230 delegates, in the Reichstag. This was a staggering blow to democrats. It heightened the internal feuding among Socialists and crippled the resistance to martial law.

  In the spiral that swept Otto Albert into political life, the family also had to grapple with undeniable signs of rising right-wing intolerance. Still, there was an effort to buoy the faith of assimilated Jews who were committed to the republic’s pluralism. Hitler may have invented nothing in his reactionary ideology, but for the Hirschmanns, poring over their newspaper, listening to the news, or gossiping among friends, his performance at the polls was seen as ephemeral. Everything was happening so fast. Seen from the sanctuary of home, the Nazis were, if anything, risible. The rotund Hermann Goering, covered with medals, was called “roly-poly.” The shifty, promiscuous, club-footed Josef Goebbels was a favored butt of jokes. But hopes that this would all pass became even stronger after January 1933.25

  Behind the scenes, the manipulation and posturing between factions on the Right brought to the fore persistent doubts about whether Germany should be a tolerant meritocratic nation as well as the reserve of hatred for the reforming republic. Socialists were paralyzed by the pace of events and the cynicism with which conservatives abandoned republican principles; to Communists this merely confirmed the fundamentally autocratic nature of capitalism, so now steps should be taken to prepare the proletariat for revolution. On January 30, Paul von Hindenburg, the president and World War I hero whose own commitment to Weimar constitutionalism was little more than a formality, brokered the creation of a new cabinet of conservatives with Hitler to serve as chancellor; while the coalition members despised each other, they did agree to collude in the demolition of the republican state. Hitler rushed to his headquarters and told Goebbels with tears in his eyes, “Now we are on our way.” The accelerated collapse of the Weimar era only compounded the confusion for a young militant trying to keep his bearings. Upon hearing the news of Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship, Otto Albert put on his uncle’s old green suit, grabbed his bicycle, and rode into the rainy Berlin night. Desperate to find out what the left-wing parties were doing to shore up the republic, he raced to the main SPD and Communist headquarters. Was there going to be a general strike? Would the Social Democrats abandon the policy of “tolerance?” Ursula caught up with him at the Communist headquarters, the Karl Liebknecht Haus, and remembered the look on his face as he leaned on his bicycle looking up at the brightly lit top floor of the building where the central committee was gathering: “He looked at the imposing building hoping for a sign of what to do next, and I was there, watching him, and now loved him more than any other person in the world. I understood that he suffered and that he had a more profound sense than me of the seriousness of the moment.”26

  What the teenagers witnessed were shock and paralysis. The vaunted Red Berlin was a paper tiger. That night, the new era came upon them with massive torchlight parades down Berlin’s avenues, huge rallies of triumphant fascists, and the throb of Nazi chants. Troopers in their brown shirts and Schutzstaffel (SS) men in their black leather marched through the very heart of the Tiergarten itself to the Brandenburg Gate and stopped before the Reichstag, where Hitler greeted them from a balcony.

  When Hindenburg asked Hitler to form the new government, many thought it would last no more than a year. But History being what it is, Hitler’s maneuver broke the cycle, though only hindsight enables the observer to see that the National Socialists were a very different breed than the hapless reactionaries who had colluded to share power with them. Nazis dominated the screaming headlines, and their thugs patrolled the streets and broke up rallies, keeping Carl and Hedwig up all night fearing for OA and Ursula’s safety. On February 27, the Socialists had called for a mass rally at the Sportpalast. It was to be the largest—and last—such gathering. Otto Albert and Ursula went and watched as the seams of the Socialist movement came apart: wait or confront, let the government implode or bring it down, let the threat pass or resort to armed resistance? The leadership dug in its heels: Hitler was a mere demagogue, it insisted; he was doomed to fail. More-radical militants jeered and bellowed from the seats: they must take action! When the rally was over, despondent Socialists filed out of the arena only to be greeted by columns of police and storm troopers. By that time it was evening. As Otto Albert, Ursula, and friends made their way home, shouting broke out in the streets, the crowds pushed and yelled. Over Berlin’s rooftops, something lit up the night sky. Otto Albert looked up to see smoke plumes rising against the crimson horizon. Then came the flames, creating dark silhouettes out of the mounted policemen.27

  Soon came the riptide of rumors: the Reichstag was burning!

  “Things did not change fundamentally,” recalled Hirschman, “until the Reichstag fire, which really marked the beginning of the political horror.”28 The next day, the chancellor, alleging a Red uprising, issued emergency decrees abolishing fundamental rights and promising harsh punishments for anyone threatening the health of the Reich. Four thousand Sturmabteilung (SA) troopers scattered across the city to begin roundups. Eventually, all opposition parties were b
anned and assemblies forbidden; left-leaning newspapers closed shop. In one night the pretext was laid for abolishing the political culture and institutions in which OA and his mates had immersed themselves. Not surprisingly, such a radical change to the rules of the political game was utterly bewildering to those on the ground, no matter how much “theoretical” reading they had done.

  The stage was set for a final campaign by Socialists. With Communists by then out of the chamber and Catholics caving to Hitler, it fell to the hobbled SPD to try to stop the Nazi juggernaut. Hitler proposed a law that would allow him to govern for four years without constitutional constraints, legislation needing a two-thirds majority from the parliament. Socialist activists met in homes, union halls, and universities to debate how to get the message beyond private circles in the absence of a free press or public assemblies. Duplicating machines were the tool of preference, but they posed an additional question—where to keep them? For Hirschmann’s SAJ group, the solution presented itself in the form of an Italian philosophy student, Eugenio Colorni, who had spotted the attractive Ursula at the library of the University of Berlin. At the time, he was working on a thesis on Leibnitz with a well-known Leibnitz specialist, Erich Auerbach, at the University of Marburg. Ursula and Otto Albert plucked up the courage to ask Colorni to keep a printing machine in his room in a hostel in Charlottenburg. There they could compose their broadsheet; since he was a foreigner, the Nazis would not suspect his involvement. Thus began a formative influence; for a short while, until Colorni returned to Marburg, his hotel room “became a nerve center for antifascist activities and publications” in the final weeks of the new regime’s consolidation.29

  Socialist militants fanned out to the streets, their bags full of leaflets, urging people to rally to the opposition of the new bill. Otto Albert joined small cells of activists for safety. They would go the top of apartment buildings and work their way down floor by floor, leaving leaflets under tenants’ doors and talking to whomever they could. Working from top to bottom made it easier to flee in case they were sighted by the police or brownshirts. Amid paranoia about moles and break-ins, Hirschmann’s group worked furiously to embolden the party to resist the legislation, hoping they could spoil the gambit. On March 23, the parliament met in the Kroll Opera House. Outside, storm troopers surrounded the building, taunting and threatening Socialist Deputies who dared enter. The police intercepted and even arrested some of the deputies, one was pummeled, and others started packing their bags in preparation to flee. That night, 448 approved of Hitler’s request; only 94 Socialists were able to stand up and have their negative votes counted as storm troopers patrolled the aisles barking at them.30

  In a matter of weeks, fear replaced confusion. Bristling with their laws, the Nazis ravaged the opposition. Arrest campaigns followed. There were so many detained that the government opened its first concentration camp at Oranienburg, 35 kilometers north of Berlin. Nazis seized Bertolt Brecht’s personal address book and used it as a guide to expand their net. Otto Albert’s rowing partner, schoolmate, and brother to his first amour, Peter Franck, found himself arrested and also had his address book confiscated. One by one, Peter’s friends and associates were rounded up. Everything had now changed for OA.

  Meanwhile, Carl had a sense that matters were getting much worse, but he kept his worries to himself. Some of his friends were feeling the pressure. Among them was René Kuczynski—a demographer and avid pacifist—whose name appeared on the SA’s list, which led the troopers to Kuczynski’s house. In the end they withdrew because the police and the storm troopers got embroiled in a dispute over who had claims to seized properties and detainees. But Kuczynski was rightly petrified. In early March, Carl clandestinely arranged for him to hide in his clinic (located in an asylum for the insane where, presumably, no one worth worrying about would live) and set about making arrangements for his friend to escape, eventually to England, where he would teach demographics at the London School of Economics.31 It took five decades for OA to learn of his father’s private heroism. Only then did he learn from Kuczynski’s son, Jürgen, of Carl’s sanctuary. Jürgen produced the original full-sized Gertrude Simon portrait, which the family had been safeguarding, as a gesture of gratitude; for half a century, the photograph of Carl had hung on the wall as a tribute to the family’s secret savior.32

  Carl was concealing another secret: he knew he was about to die of cancer. In January, he grew visibly unwell. The children were told he had ulcers. Then one day he returned home from the clinic with X-rays of his stomach and clinically pointed out the growths to his confused, and then upset, children. Some time around March 20, shortly after Kuczynski’s hiding, an operation removed the cancerous tissue; but it was too late, the disease had metastasized. Carl lived only another ten days. The children were not encouraged to see him—the decay was so swift and awful that Hedwig did not want them to remember their father in this condition. Instead, she paced the Hohenzollernstrasse apartment repeating to herself, “I must remember him, I must remember him.”33 His friends and associates, mostly doctors, ministered to him and were at his bedside constantly. Carl was pronounced dead in a hospital in Charlottenburg on March 31, 1933. The next day, the first wave of government-sanctioned violence swept Berlin, with assaults and boycotts on Jewish shops and businesses.

  The funeral brought out a crowd of doctors, friends, and family. There were memorial speeches. Ulrich Friedemann, Carl’s closest friend, gave the longest of the tributes. Thirteen-year-old Eva was inconsolable as the wreath was laid before his coffin. Carl’s body was laid to rest at the Heerstrasse Cemetery, a handsome interconfessional burial site, which the Nazis, knowing Jews were buried there, later slated to raze for the Berlin Olympics of 1936. After the funeral, the family retreated to the apartment on Hohenzollernstrasse with the closest relatives and friends. There, Hedwig’s grief burst in great fits of sobbing. Friends and family tried to comfort her. By contrast, Otto Albert was a model of unfeigned stoicism. The three children retreated down the hallway to the back of the apartment to one of their bedrooms; there they cried together and shared a few words. As evening approached, OA emerged from the bedroom to inform the guests and his mother that he would be leaving very soon for Paris. With all the grief in the room, it was hard to hear this quiet but decisive message. Most, including his sisters, figured it was a going to be a short vacation. On April 2, he was gone—five days before his eighteenth birthday. These were his final hours in Berlin; he would not return until 1979.34

  Otto Albert had clearly been weighing his options. In the days before his father’s death, news of Peter Franck’s arrest had driven him into hiding; by then, people were learning that address books were inventories of suspects. There was talk that the government would throw Jewish students out of the country’s universities; that became law on April 1. There were also rumors that Jews would be banned from the legal profession; that decree came a week later. Faculties of law were thus gutted of their Jewish students. Antifascist activity had come to a halt “by fiat,” Hirschman noted, shaking his head as he recalled his final days in Berlin, and the Nazis had won. It was clear that fighting within the system (what Hirschman would later call the practice of “voice”)—at least for the time being—was not just futile, it was suicidal. It was time to open new vistas (what he would later call “exit”).35 “Those of us who left at the time,” Hirschman told an American documentary filmmaker years later, “left with the hope that this would be a regime that would somehow break its neck very soon, and that somehow there would be some … action on the part of some section of German society that would prevent this regime from taking root.”36

  It is possible that this decision to flee was a way of deflecting other sources of pain. It is hard to say for sure since Hirschman was tight-lipped about his final months in Berlin, preferring to layer his traumatic experiences with a heavy armor of silence. We get a rare glimpse into his grief, and his efforts to make something of it, from a letter to his mother written
in Paris a year after his father’s funeral. “The calendar tells me that a year has passed, otherwise I wouldn’t know if it has been a month or three years. I have experienced so much joy and so many new things. On the other hand, everything that we experienced and suffered stands so near, insistent, and physical before my eyes.” The rush to embrace the new somewhere else did not succeed in obliterating the grief of the past. While the young émigré uprooted himself in part to allow the challenge of the present to crowd out old sorrows, they did not disappear. “It was the first great pain in my life. I did not have time to think out this pain because after three days the reality of the Paris trip demanded my thoughts. And so it happens that the pain always emerged in the quiet hours.”37 For the rest of his life, the quiet hours of Easter would summon memories of the loss of his father, the first of a series of losses that would sear his memory of the 1930s.

  Distance and recollection did afford Otto Albert an opportunity to find in a father’s life some significance for a son who was embarking on his own. On September 8, 1933, the day before what would have been his father’s fifty-fourth birthday, the eighteen-year-old fatherless son sat down to muster some rare words of sorrow in a letter to his mother. Characteristically, he also felt compelled to cheer his mother up and thus remind her of the good times. “When I try today to imagine Daddy in spirit I always automatically see him working at his desk in a scientific discussion with a colleague or in the white operating apron at the clinic. In this way, I respected, admired, and loved him best.” But it was not the professional achievement that motivated this admiration: “The truly great thing about his demeanor, which was so unique and worthwhile, was that he put himself behind his work.” In keeping with the Bildung principles with which Carl and his class had legitimated the republican system and instilled in their sons’ education, the teenage Hirschmann embraced the effort to thwart the viral despair among progressive reformists. But the uplift was jumbled with other memories. That of the failed promotion still stung, bitterly: “When he applied for the direction of the hospital, he did this because he knew that he could fill this post better than any other. The direction was everything to him in his judgment and that of others.” OA scribbled in the margins of this letter, “Given that it must have already earlier strongly oppressed him that a person is not treated according to his achievements but instead according to his relationships, how the present system would have affected him!” It was his father’s pursuit of “this human ideal,” of not working for himself but living for his work, that most inspired the young son: “The work was its own purpose, this self-creation through work seems to be the one right, fruitful, sensible, and noble mindset, from which every human activity should emanate.” It was in this “resistance of the ‘ego’ that I preserve him in myself and in this way he lives on for me.” Here was a way—through work, self-improvement, resisting despair—to keep nostalgia and narcissistic regression at bay. In an age of abandonment, of failed gods and dashed hopes, the young OA did not so much feel violently separated from a loved one than bonded to his example. OA’s was not the vengeful father; Carl’s spirit was nothing like Hamlet’s phantom. But like Hamlet’s, Carl’s example was the invention of the living, and throughout OA’s life one can occasionally glimpse a son haunted by tragedy. In this epistle, however, we see a man looking forward, not backward, searching for solace, not sadness, as he stepped into the world beyond a traumatized Berlin.38